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Asteroids Neg
Asteroids Neg...........................................................................................................................................................1 ***STATUS QUO SOLVES............................................................................................................1 ***STATUS QUO SOLVES.......................................................................................................................................1 STATUS QUO SOLVES ASTEROIDS......................................................................................................................2 DETECTION NOW..................................................................................................................................................3 ***LARGE ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE..........................................................................................3 ***LARGE ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE...................................................................................................................3 NO THREAT............................................................................................................................................................4 NO COMET THREAT..............................................................................................................................................5 BIAS.........................................................................................................................................................................6 BIAS.........................................................................................................................................................................7 NO EXTINCTION....................................................................................................................................................8 NUKE WAR OUTWEIGHS......................................................................................................................................9 NUKE WAR OUTWEIGHS....................................................................................................................................10 RISK CALCULUS....................................................................................................................................................11 ***SMALL ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE........................................................................................11 ***SMALL ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE..................................................................................................................11 STATUS QUO SOLVES ACCIDENTS....................................................................................................................12 NO IMPACT TO ACCIDENTS................................................................................................................................13 SMALL COLLISION GOOD...................................................................................................................................14 ***SOLVENCY............................................................................................................................14 ***SOLVENCY.......................................................................................................................................................14 DEFLECTION FAILS.............................................................................................................................................15 DETECTION NOT ENOUGH.................................................................................................................................16 SPACE-BASED FAILS............................................................................................................................................17 WONT FIND COMETS.........................................................................................................................................18 CANT SOLVE SMALL STRIKES...........................................................................................................................19 ***OFFCASE ARGUMENTS........................................................................................................19 ***OFFCASE ARGUMENTS..................................................................................................................................19 SPENDING LINK..................................................................................................................................................20 POLITICS LINK.....................................................................................................................................................21 EUROPE C/P SOLVENCY.....................................................................................................................................22 DOD C/P SOLVENCY............................................................................................................................................23

***STATUS QUO SOLVES

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STATUS QUO SOLVES ASTEROIDS

NASA has effective asteroid response plan GREEN 2007 (James, November 8, Dr. Green received his Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Iowa in 1979 and began working in the Magnetospheric

Physics Branch at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in 1980. At Marshall, Dr. Green developed and managed the Space Physics Analysis Network, which provided many scientists, all over the world, with rapid access to data, other scientists, and specific NASA computer and information resources NEAR-EARTH OBJECTS (NEOS)STATUS OF THE SURVEY PROGRAM AND REVIEW OF NASA'S 2007 REPORT TO CONGRESS, http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi? dbname=110_house_hearings&docid=f:38057.pdf)//DT

NASA has an NEO contingency notification plan to be utilized in the very unlikely event an object is detected with significant probability of impacting the Earth. The plan establishes procedures between the detection sites, the Minor Planet Center, the NASA NEO Program Office at JPL, and NASA Headquarters to first quickly verify and validate the data and orbit on the object of interest, and then up-channel confirmed information in a timely manner to the NASA Administrator. These procedures were first exercised with the discovery of the object now known as Apophis, which was found in December 2004 in a hazardous orbit but determined to not have a significant probability of impacting the Earth in the near-term. NASA will continue to refine this internal contingency plan, and begin work with other U.S. Government agencies and institutions when directed. We can already detect large asteroids Worden 2002 - United States Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base (October 24, S.P., Military Perspectives on the Near-Earth Object (Neo) Threat. NASA
Finally, just

Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids, http://www.noao.edu/meetings/mitigation/media/arlington.extended.pdf pg. 101 )

about everyone knows of the dinosaur killer asteroids. These are objects, a few kilometers across, that strike on time scales of tens of millions of years. While the prospect of such strikes grabs peoples attention and make great catastrophe movies, too much focus on these events has, in my opinion, been counterproductive. Most leaders in the United States or elsewhere believe there are more pressing problems than something that may only happen every 50-100 million years. I advocate we focus our energies on the smaller, more immediate threats. This is not to say we do not worry about the large threats. However, Im reasonably confidant we will find almost all large objects within a decade or less. If we find any that seem to be on a near-term collision coursewhich I believe unlikelywe can deal with the problem then. No chance of extinction from asteroids weve found the biggest asteroids Morrison 2006 - Working Group on Near Earth Objects, International Astronomical Union (August, David, Asteroid and comet impacts: the ultimate
environmental catastrophe http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1845/2041.full) The survey

results have already transformed our understanding of the impact threat. If we focus on asteroids larger than 2km, which is the nominal size for a global catastrophe, then we are already nearly 90 per cent complete. For 5km diameters, which may be near the threshold for an extinction event, we are complete today. Thus, astronomers have already assured us that we are not due for an extinction-level impact from an asteroid within the next century. Barring a very unlikely strike by a large comet, we are not about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Thus, the rest of this paper focuses on the more frequent impacts by sub-kilometre asteroids, which are still big enough to destroy a large city or a
small country, or to devastate a coastline, with possibly world-altering economic and social consequences.

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DETECTION NOW
Squo solves the aff- US already participates in international NEO detection National Research Council 10 Research Council Committee to Review Near-Earth-Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation
Strategiesand Space Studies Board Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences (Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth-Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action? docID=10405102)//DT

Recognizing that impacts from near-Earth objects represent a hazard to humanity, the United States, the European Union. Japan, and other countries cooperatively organized to identify, track, and study NEOs in an effort termed "Spaceguard." From this organization, a nonprofit group named the Spaceguard Foundation was created to coordinate NEO detection and studies: it is currently located at the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Centre for Earth Observation (ESRIN) in Frascati. Italy. The United States input to this collective effort comprises three aspects: telescopic search efforts to find NEOs, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the NASA NEO Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Existing, retired, and proposed telescopic systems for the U.S. NEO searches are detailed below. Other telescopic survey, detection, and characterization efforts are conducted worldwide and work synergistically with U.S. telescopic searches (e.g.. Asiago-DLR Asteroid Survey, jointly operated by the University of Padua and the German Aerospace Center [DLR|. Campo Imperatore Near-Earth Object Survey at Rome Observatory; and the Bisei Spaceguard Center of the Japanese Spaceguard Association). To date, the U.S. search effort has been the major contributor to the number of known NEOs. The functions of the two U.S. data- and information-gathering offices, the MPC and the NEO Program Office, are complementary. A
European data- and information-gathering office, the Near-Earth Objects Dynamic Site (NEODyS) is maintained at the University of Pisa in Italy, with a mirror site at the University of Valladolid in Spain. These three services are described below.

Funding now and increasing Science Insider 2/14 (2011, Andrew Lawler and Sara Reardon, Climate Science, Asteroid Detection Big Winners in NASA Budget,
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/02/climate-science-asteroid-detection.html)//DT NASA will have to live with a stagnant budgetagain. The $18.7 billion proposed

by the Administration is the same amount as 2010 and 2011, and science funding would continue to hover at about $5 billion. But in the details are significant winners and losers. Earth science would grow from $1.439 billion to $1.797 billion in 2012, though House of Representatives
Republicans are sure to attack a program focused on understanding global change. Meanwhile, Mars explorationwhich this year stands at $438 million would spike at $602 million next year, but plummet to less than half that amount by 2016. Funds for near-Earth object observations

would quadruple to $20.4 million. And NASA Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson said the agency will kill a dark-energy mission in
the hope that it can collaborate more cheaply with the European Space Agency. She added that details on how the agency will fund a massive cost overrun in the James Webb Space Telescope won't be ready until this summer.

***LARGE ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE

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NO THREAT
Theres no imminent threat to the Earth and we would have centuries of warning in the status quo BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 168-169
Cooler heads intervened. Donald Yeomans of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, The comet will pass no closer to the Earth than 60 lunar distances [14 million miles] on August 5, 2126. There

is no evidence for a threat from Swift-Tuttle in 2126 nor from any other known comet or asteroid in the next 200 years.96 Even Brian Marsden concurred. He retracted his prediction, though he held out the possibility that in the year 3034 the comet could come within a million miles of Earth. Surveying this very false and very loud alarm, Sally Stephens, writing in the journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, observed, Marsdens prediction, and later retraction, of a possible collision between the Earth and the comet highlight the fact that we will most likely have century-long warnings of any potential collision, based on calculations of orbits of known and newly discovered asteroids and comets. Plenty of time to decide what to do.97 Ignore their impactyoure more likely to be killed by lightning than an asteroid SIEGEL 2010 (Ethan, theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis and Clark College, How Afraid of Asteroids Should You Be?
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/11/how_afraid_of_asteroids_should.php) But -- and my opinion here definitely runs against the mainstream -- I think this about are the frequency and the odds of an asteroid strike harming you. If

hysteria is absolutely ridiculous. One of the things you almost never hear large asteroid strikes happened every few decades, we'd have something legitimate to prepare for and worry about. But if you've only got a one-in-a-million chance of an asteroid harming you over your lifetime -- meaning you are over 100 times more likely to be struck by lightning than harmed by an asteroid -- perhaps there are better ways to spend your resources.

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NO COMET THREAT
No comet threat Near-Earth Object Science Definition Team 2003 (August 22, Study to Determine the Feasibility of Extending the Search for
NearEarth Objects to Smaller Limiting Diameters Prepared at the Request of National Aeronautics and Space Administration Office of Space Science Solar System Exploration Division http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/neoreport030825.pdf)

The relative constancy of the long-period comet discovery rate over the past 300 years, the results from the Sekanina and Yeomans (1984) analysis, the Marsden (1992) type analysis and the above reality check all suggest that the threat of long-period comets is only about 1% the threat from NEAs. Levison et al. (2002) note that as comets evolve inward from the Oort cloud, the vast majority of them must physically disrupt rather than fade into dormant comets; otherwise, vast numbers of dormant long-period comets would have been discovered by current NEO surveys. This conclusion would strengthen the case against there being a significant number of dormant long-period or Halley-type comets that annually slip past the Earth unnoticed.

While Earth impacts by long-period comets are relatively rare when compared to the NEA impact flux, the present number of Earth-crossing asteroids drops very steeply for asteroids larger than 2 kilometers in diameter, more steeply than the flux of cometary nuclei (Weissman and Lowry 2003). Hence, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that longperiod comets provide most of the large craters on the Moon (diameter > 60 km) and most of the extinction level large impacts on Earth (Shoemaker et al., 1990). The conclusion is that, while a newly discovered Earth-threatening, long-period comet would have a relatively short warning time, the impact threat of these objects is only about 1% the threat from NEAs. More generally, the threat from all long-period or short-period comets, whether active or dormant, is about 1% the threat from the NEA population. The limited

amount of resources available for near-Earth object searches would be better spent on finding Earththreatening NEAs with the knowledge that these types of surveys will, in any case, find many of the Earth-crossing, long-period comets as well. Finally, it has been argued that we currently enjoy a relatively low cometary flux into the inner solar system and that some future comet shower, perhaps due to a passing star in the Oort cloud or a perturbation of our Oort cloud by the material in the galactic plane, could greatly increase this flux. The time scale for an increased cometary flux of this type is far longer than one hundred years so that current NEO searches can afford to concentrate their efforts on the more dangerous NEAs.

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BIAS
Asteroid calculations are bad sciencejournals publish the most extreme stories and the actual risk is close to zero BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 157-158 We should here acknowledge, without necessarily casting aspersions on any of the papers discussed in this chapter, the tendency of scientific journals to publish sexy articles. (Sexy, at least, by the decidedly unsexy standards of scientific journals.) Writing in the Public Library of Science, Neal S.
economists call the has made the highest estimation often overestimation of a reserves size and capacity, so those papers

Young of the National Institutes of Health, John P.A. Ioannidis of the Biomedical Research Institute in Greece, and Omar Al-Ubaydli of George Mason University applied what

winners curse of auction theory to scientific publishing. Just as the winner in, say, an auction of oil drilling rights is the firm that that are selected for publication in the elite journals of science are often those with the most extreme, spectacular results.63 These papers may make headlines in the mainstream press, which leads to greater political pressure to fund projects and programs congruent with these extreme findings. As The Economist put it in an article presenting the argument of Young, Ioannidis, and Al-Ubaydli, Hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers are hired, promoted and funded according not only to how much work they produce, but also where it gets published. Column inches in journals such as Nature and Science are coveted; authors understand full well that studies with spectacular results are more likely to be published than are those that will not lead to a wire story. The problem, though, is that these flashy papers with dramatic results often turn out to be false.64 In a 2005 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis found that of the 49 most-cited papers on the effectiveness of medical
interventions, published in highly visible journals in 19902004 a quarter of the randomised trials and five of six nonrandomised studies had already been contradicted or found to have been exaggerated by 2005. Thus, those who pay the price of the winners curse in scientific research are those, whether sick patients or beggared taxpayers, who are forced to either submit to or fund specious science, medical or otherwise. The trio of authors call the implications of this finding dire, pointing to a 2008 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that almost all trials of anti-depressant medicines that had had positive results had been published, while almost all trials of antidepressants that had come up with negative results remained either unpublished or were published with the results presented so that they would appear positive. Young, Ioannidis, and Al-Ubaydli conclude that science is hard work with limited rewards and only occasional successes. Its interest and importance should speak for themselves, without hyperbole. Elite

journals, conscious of the need to attract attention and stay relevant, cutting edge, and avoid the curse of stodginess, are prone to publish gross exaggeration and findings of dubious merit. When lawmakers and grant-givers take their cues from these journals, as they do, those tax dollars ostensibly devoted to the pursuit of pure science and the application of scientific research are diverted down unprofitable, even impossible channels. The charlatans make names for themselves, projects of questionable merit grow fat on the public purse, and the disconnect between what is real and what subsidy-seekers tell us is real gets ever wider.65 The matter, or manipulation, of odds in regards to a collision between a space rock and Earth would do Jimmy the Greek proud. As Michael B. Gerrard writes in Risk Analysis in an article assessing the relative allocation of public funds to hazardous waste site cleanup and protection against killer comets and asteroids, Asteroids and comets are the ultimate example of a low-probability/high-consequence event: no one in recorded human history is confirmed to have ever died from one. Gerrard writes that several billion people will die as the result of an impact at some time in the coming half
million years, although that half-million year time-frame is considerably shorter than the generally accepted extinction-event period.66 The expected deaths from a collision with an asteroid of, say, one kilometer or more in diameter are so huge that by jacking up the tiny possibility of such an event even a little bit the annual death rate of this never-beforeexperienced disaster exceeds deaths in plane crashes, earthquakes, and other actual real live dangers. Death

rates from outlandish or unusual causes are fairly steady across the years. About 120 Americans die in airplane crashes annually, and about 90 more die of lightning strikes. Perhaps five might die in garage-door opener accidents. The total number of deaths in any given year by asteroid or meteor impact is zero holding constant since the dawn of recorded time.

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BIAS
Asteroid collision studies are exaggerated to get more money for other projects BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 166
volume was published, those

The authors conclude that increasing public awareness may be the key to demands for action to deal with the impact hazard. And so for the fifteen years since the Gehrels

who seek public funds to deal with this rather hazy hazard have done their best to raise public awareness through various means.85 Curiously, a bracing shot of skeptical clarity appeared in the toebreakinglyif-you-drop-it long Hazards Due to Comets & Asteroids on page 1203, which one seriously doubts one in a hundred readers ever make it to. P.R. Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory writes: One problem for those advocating an impact hazard defense and/or detection system is that their recommendations often appear to be self-serving. Astronomers who study small bodies have advocated an observing program that emphasizes searching for large (> 1 kilometer) Earth-crossing asteroids and comets . These are, in general, the same objects that those astronomers are currently discovering with their existing search programs. Thus, their recommendations can be viewed as motivated by a desire to obtain additional funding and instrumentation for their ongoing work.86 What a world of wisdom and insight is contained in those sentences! Astronomers and engineers whose livelihoods depend on the perception of an impact hazard develop and publish studies concluding that there is an impact hazard. The circle goes round and round, and fills, gradually, with taxpayer money. The lessons of Chicken Little, suggests Weissman, are one factor that has kept the funding of such programs from really taking off. Weissman urges his colleagues to GO SLOW. Dont attempt to divert substantial resources to a program that, at present, is neither necessary, nor prudent.87 Asteroid threats are exaggerated to get money for space programs BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 167-168

That same volume contained a paper by Andrew F. Cheng and Robert W. Farquhar of the Applied Physics Laboratory, J. Veverka of Cornell University, and C. Pilcher of NASA arguing for space missions to NEOs in order to better determine their composition and structure.90 Going them one better were a sextet of researchers from NASA, the Russian Space Agency, and other institutions who wrote of manned exploration of NEOs, which would, among other things, strengthen the integrity of any foreseeable

program of human lunar and Mars exploration.91 The NEO scare has many spinoffs, it seems: its missions can be even shake-down cruises for that long-delayed manned mission to Mars. The challenges of dealing with microgravity and cosmic rays, designing effective life support, and ensuring communications across the void of space would be rehearsed in manned NEO missions in preparation for a trip to Mars. Political scientist John Mueller, author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (2006), quotes a Turkish proverb If your enemy be an ant, imagine him to be an elephant which he describes as spectacularly bad advice.92 To instance, the

drastically misestimate your enemy is to badly misallocate resources. For Department of Homeland Security announces, Todays terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.93 This language, preposterously untrue can terrorists really strike in Baton Rouge with an antimatter gun, or in Yankton, South Dakota, with a secret decoder ring? could easily be transferred into any scare-mongering story about killer comets or rogue asteroids threatening the earth. Carl Sagan said that the extraordinarily remote chance that an asteroid or comet might strike
Earth justified indeed, compelled a vigorous space program. Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.94 Now,

given that a KT like disaster is expected every 50 or 100 million years, we might be excused for asking just how imperative it is that our government lead us into the brave new world of spacefaring. To ask this question, however, is to reveal oneself as unimaginative, dull, lacking in foresight, perhaps troglodytic, certainly far from au courant. This is asteroid alarmism as a trick shot, as a bulked-up NEO-detection program leads to an enhanced manned space travel program. Just as professors learned to hustle in the regime of largesse after Sputnik, in Walter A. McDougalls phrase, so did they prove fast on their feet in tracking down killer asteroid funds.95 Warning, in grave sepulchral tones, about the end of the world does tend to concentrate the attention of the listener. And if the Cassandra giving the warning has a Ph.D. after her name, all the better. Surely no doctor of philosophy would exaggerate in order to have a pet project funded! The press does its part, as it always has. Sensationalism sells, and if it isnt exactly grounded in truth, well, wink wink, everyone knows you cant always believe what you read or hear.

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NO EXTINCTION
No evidence that asteroid strike would cause extinctioneven if they did we have 40 million years to prepare BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 144-145) It should be noted that the Alvarez et al. hypothesis was not universally accepted. As Peter M. Sheehan and Dale A. Russell wrote in their paper
Faunal Change Following the CretaceousTertiary Impact: Using Paleontological Data to Assess the Hazards of Impacts, published in Hazards Due to Comets & Asteroids (1994), edited by Tom Gehrels, many

paleontologists resist accepting a cause and effect relationship between the iridum

evidence, the Chicxulub crater, and the mass extinction of 65 million years ago.15 For instance, Dennis V. Kent of the LamontDoherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, writing in Science, disputed that a high concentration of iridium is necessarily associated with an extraordinary extraterrestrial event and that, moreover, a

large asteroid is not likely to have had the dire consequences to life on the earth that they propose.16 Briefly, Kent argues that the Alvarez team mistakenly chose the 1883 Krakatoa eruption as the standard from it extrapolated the effects of stratospheric material upon sunlight. Yet Krakatoa was too small a volcanic eruption from which to draw any such conclusions; better, says Kent, is the Toba caldera in Sumatra, remnant of an enormous eruption 75,000 years ago. (A caldera is the imprint left upon the earth from a volcanic eruption.) The volume of the Toba caldera is 400 times as great as that of Krakatoa considerably closer to the effect that an asteroid impact might have. Yet the sunlight attenuation factor [for Toba] is not nearly as large as the one postulated by Alvarez et al. for the asteroid impact. Indeed, the Toba eruption is not associated with any mass extinctions , leading Kent to believe that the cause of the massive extinctions is not closely related to a drastic reduction in sunlight alone.17 Reporting in Science, Richard A. Kerr wrote that Many geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, and statisticians find the geological evidence merely suggestive or even nonexistent and the supposed underlying mechanisms improbable at best. Even the iridium anomalies have been challenged: Bruce Corliss of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute argues that the major extinctions associated with the KT event were not immediate and catastrophic but gradual and apparently linked to progressive climate change.18 Others argue that a massive volcanic event predating the Alvarezian killer asteroid created an overwhelming greenhouse effect and set the dinosaurs up for the knockout punch. A considerable number of scientists believe that gradually changing sea levels were the primary cause of the KT Extinction. If either of these hypotheses is true and a substantial number of geologists hold these positions then the killer asteroid is getting credit that it does not deserve. Even if the KT Extinction was the work of a rock from space, the Alvarez team credits a probable interval of 100 million years between collisions with 10km-diameter objects.19 The next rendezvous with annihilation wont be overdue for about 40 million years. We have time.

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NUKE WAR OUTWEIGHS

Nuclear war outweighs asteroids due to both probability and magnitude BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 155) Given that there is no known incident of a major crater-forming impact in recorded human history, argues P.R. Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and since the credibility of the impact hazard is justifiably low with the public and governmental decision-makers, we ought to defer the development of a defensive system until such time as technological advances permit us to do so at a reasonable cost.55 There is also, he points out at the risk of being called chauvinist, no doubt, by the more feverish Earth-savers the pragmatic and/or parochial fact that the United States accounts for 6.4 percent of the total land mass of the Earth, and only 1.9 percent of the total area, including water.56 Thus anything short of a civilization-ending asteroid would be exceedingly unlikely to hit the U.S. By contrast, such threats as infectious diseases and nuclear war present a more real and immediate danger to Americans, and to earthlings in general. Perhaps money would be better spent addressing those
matters?

Nuclear war outweighs asteroid collisioncivilian infrastructure would be targeted which makes recovery less likely BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 155-157 For a near-impossible scenario, an awful lot of laser ink has gone into studies of the consequences of an impact. Lets face it: The topic is sexy. The effects of an Earth-space rock collision with energies below 10 Megatons would be negligible, write Owen B. Toon, Kevin Zahnle, and David Morrison of the NASA Ames Research Center, Richard P. Turco of UCLA, and Curt Covey of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Reviews of Geophysics. Impacts measuring between 10 Megatons and 10 to the 4th power Megatons say, comets and asteroids with diameters of less than 400 meters and 650 meters, respectively would be equivalent to many natural disasters of recent history. In other words, death-dealing but manageable in a the authors do not believe a global catastrophe would occur at less than an energy level of 10 to the 6th power Megatons. They do admit to considerable uncertainty, noting that previous estimates may have overstated the damage at certain levels of impact, though they say, with great wisdom, that it is to be hoped that no large-scale terrestrial experiments occur to shed light on our theoretical oversights.59 They can say that again. The impact upon the Earth of an object of more than 400 meters in diameter crashing into an ocean would be a tsunami, an enormous wave created by the impact of the asteroid or comet upon the ocean floor, which could cause massive numbers of deaths due to drowning, though it would be highly unlikely to cause extinction of the human species. A wall of water a wave over 60 meters high would sweep over the impacted oceans coasts. The huge and
widespread fires would claim uncounted lives, too, and the opacity of the smoke generated by the fires would contribute to the sharply reduced level of sunlight upon the Earth. The consequences of an impact with an energy of 10 to the 7th power Megatons could be KT like, as 100-meters-high tsunamis swamp coastal zones, fires rage around the world, and Light levels may drop so low from the smoke, dust, and sulfate as to make vision impossible.60 Photosynthesis, too, becomes impossible, and food supplies disappear. Dwellers in sea and on land perish of fire, starvation, or flood. In the aftermath, survivors would compete with rodents for the available food. (As paleontologists Peter M. Sheehan and Dale A. Russell note, In the short term domestic cats might play a useful role in protecting food supplies.61 Humans, they believe, would

global sense. Those with an energy range in the 10 to the 5th6th power Megatons are transitional the fires, earthquakes, and tsunamis would unleash devastation, though

survive such a catastrophe, though in greatly reduced numbers and for millennia they would be vegetarians practicing subsistence agriculture. No doubt, that sounds appealing to some of the greener readers.) If an impact with a smaller body is sometimes compared to the aftermath of a nuclear war, the fact that in a war the civilian infrastructure is specifically targeted means that it is much more likely that society could cope with the problems following a small impact better than it could adjust to the problems following a nuclear war, according to Toon, Zahnle, et al.62 Interestingly, the authors say that acid rain very much a fashionable
environmental cause in the 1980s, though it has since receded before global warming would not be a widespread problem, although the rain may well be acidified due to the nitric oxide resulting from impact-induced shock waves.

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NUKE WAR OUTWEIGHS

Nuclear war causes extinction PHILLIPS 2000 (Dr. Allen, Peace Activist, Nuclear Winter Revisited, October, http://www.peace.ca/nuclearwinterrevisited.htm) Those of us who were involved in peace activities in the 80's probably remember a good deal about nuclear winter. Those who have become involved later may have heard little about it. No scientific study has been published since 1990, and very little appears now in the peace or nuclear abolition literature. *It is still important.* With thousands of rocket-launched
weapons at "launch-on-warning", any day there could be an all-out nuclear war by accident. The fact that there are only half as many nuclear bombs as there were in the 80's makes no significant difference. Deaths

from world-wide starvation after the war would be several times the number from direct effects of the bombs, and the surviving fraction of the human race might then diminish and vanish after a few generations of hunger and disease, in a radioactive environment.

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RISK CALCULUS
High-magnitude logic doesnt applyasteroid strike is so improbable that we can just ignore it BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 175) Now, it makes sense for the appropriate agencies to make plans for the evacuation of cities in the event of a levee breaking or a power plant disaster. These incidents are plausible, or at least thinkable. Better safe than sorry. A collision with an asteroid or comet, on the other hand, is so highly implausible, so exceedingly unlikely, that planning for it is a potent blend of the useless and the expensive. Boosting the DHSs National Response Plan was Evan R. Seamone, writing in 2004 in

the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review. Seamone bemoaned that Current legal and policy efforts to enable adequate defense against potential asteroid or comet collisions with the earth are insufficient because they are indirectly premised upon theories that require verification of a clear and imminent threat before governmental agencies can act. In other words, the antediluvian theories that underlay our system and the systems of most other governments of the world require that there be an actual threat before the state is mobilized to meet that threat. Obviously the philosophers who spin such theories never saw Armageddon on DVD. As an alternative for the 21st century, Seamone

proposed a precautionary principle as the cornerstone of a governmental asteroid defense program. This tenet which might also be known as the fling-open-the-doors-to-the-Treasury principle requires governments to take action to prevent harm even when it is uncertain if, when, or where the harm will occur. The any risk logic would make all decisionmaking impossibleevaluate probability over magnitude MESKILL 2009 (David, professor at Colorado School of Mines and PhD from Harvard, The "One Percent Doctrine" and Environmental Faith, Dec 9,
http://davidmeskill.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-percent-doctrine-and-environmental.html) Tom Friedman's by a major columnist that I can remember ever reading. He applies

piece today in the Times on the environment (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1) is one of the flimsiest pieces Cheney's "one percent doctrine" (which is similar to the environmentalists' "precautionary principle") to the risk of environmental armageddon. But this doctrine is both intellectually incoherent and practically irrelevant. It is intellectually incoherent because it cannot be applied consistently in a world with many potential disaster scenarios. In addition to the global-warming risk, there's also the asteroid-hitting-the-earth risk, the terrorists-with-nuclear-weapons risk (Cheney's original scenario), the super-duper-pandemic risk, etc. Since each of these risks, on the "one percent doctrine," would deserve all of our attention, we cannot address all of them simultaneously. That is, even within the one-percent mentality, we'd have to begin prioritizing, making choices and trade-offs. But why then should we only make these trade-offs between responses to disaster scenarios? Why not also choose between them and other, much more cotidien, things we value? Why treat the unlikely but cataclysmic event as somehow fundamentally different, something that cannot be integrated into all the other calculations we make? And in fact, this is how we behave all the time. We get into our cars in order to buy a cup of coffee, even though there's some chance we will be killed on the way to the coffee shop. We are constantly risking death, if slightly, in order to pursue the things we value. Any creature that adopted the "precautionary principle" would sit at home - no, not even there, since there is some chance the building might collapse. That creature would neither be able to act, nor not act, since it would nowhere discover perfect safety. Friedman's
approach reminds me somehow of Pascal's wager - quasi-religious faith masquerading as rational deliberation (as Hans Albert has pointed out, Pascal's wager itself doesn't add up: there may be a God, in fact, but it may turn out that He dislikes, and even damns, people who believe in him because they've calculated it's in their best interest to do so). As my friend James points out, it's

striking how descriptions of the environmental risk always describe the situation as if it were five to midnight. It must be near midnight, since otherwise there would be no need to act. But it can never be five *past* midnight, since then acting would be pointless and we might as well party like it was 2099. Many religious movements - for example the early Jesus movement - have exhibited precisely this combination of traits: the looming apocalypse, with the time (just barely) to take action.

***SMALL ASTEROIDS ADVANTAGE

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STATUS QUO SOLVES ACCIDENTS

CTBT verification solves asteroid strikes and accidental war NATURE NEWS 2002 (Microphones tell asteroids from A-bombs, July 17, http://www.nature.com/news/1998/020715/full/news020715-4.html) Ground-based groups of microphones, called infrasonic arrays, can distinguish atomic blasts from exploding asteroids up
to a few hundred kilometres away, say Brown, Tagliaferri and colleagues1. The arrays pick up the very-low-frequency sounds that penetrate hundreds of kilometres of the Earth's atmosphere. Multiple

arrays pinpoint the position and size of a blast almost as accurately as the satellites used by US Space Command, the researchers show. Right now, there are 12 such arrays. Sixty will be built within the next 5 years as part of the CTBT International Monitoring Network. The rules of the treaty dictate that their data must be available to all. A
global array should spot meteor explosions from most areas of the world, says Brown. The infrasonic network will also be important for research. Meteorites smaller than 10 metres across are hard to detect with telescopes, so scientists have little idea of how often they breach our atmosphere. An

idea of how frequently small asteroids occur is important for estimating the likelihood of larger ones, such as the one that devastated thousands of square kilometres of Siberian forest in Tunguska in 1908. The microphone array, says Matthew Genge of the Natural History Museum in London, UK, "will help us tell just how many Tunguskas we can expect".

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NO IMPACT TO ACCIDENTS
Failsafes and CBMs check accidental war ROSENKRANTZ 2005 (Steven, Foreign Affairs Officer, Office of Strategic and Theater Defenses, Bureau of Arms Control, Weapons of mass destruction: an encyclopedia of worldwide policy, technology, and history, p 1-2) Since the dawn of the nuclear era, substantial thought and effort have gone into preventing accidental and inadvertent nuclear war. Nuclear powers have attempted to construct the most reliable technology and procedures for command and control of nuclear weapons, including robust, fail-safe early warning systems for verifying attacks. The United States and the Soviet Union also maintained secure second-strike capabilities to reduce their own incentives to launch a preemptive strike against each other during crisis situations or out of fear of a surprise attack. The two nuclear superpowers worked bilaterally to foster strategic stability by means of arms control and confidence-building measures and agreements. Several confidencebuilding agreements were negotiated between the two-superpowers to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war: the 1971 Agreement on Measures to
Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War, the 1972 Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents on and over the High Seas, and the 1973 Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States and the Russian Federation have continued to offer unilateral initiatives and to negotiate bilateral agreements on dealerting and detargeting some of their nuclear forces to further reduce the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear accident. They have concluded agreements on providing each other with notifications in the event of ballistic missile launches or other types of military activities that could possibly be misunderstood or misconstrued by the other party. No nuclear accidents PERROW 1999 (Charles, Professor of Sociology at Yale, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technology, p 257-258)
weapons such as dropping them or an accidental launch, but with

No such encouraging lessons come from the section on nuclear weapons and early warning systems. We will not dwell on the fate of the earth, that is, the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but on the limits of human capabilities and the even narrower limits of organizational capabilities. There is much to fear from accidents with nuclear

regard to firing them after a false warning we reach a surprising conclusion, one I was not prepared for: because of the safety systems involved in a launch-on-warning scenario, it is virtually impossible for well-intended actions to bring about an accidental attack (malevolence or derangement is something else). In one sense this is not all that comforting, since if there were a true warning that the Russian missiles were coming, it looks as if it would also be nearly impossible for there to be an intended launch, so complex and prone to failure is this system. It is an interesting case to reflect upon: at some point does the complexity of a system and its coupling become so enormous that a system no longer exists?
Since our ballistic weapons system has never been called upon to perform (it cannot even be tested), we cannot be sure that it really constitutes a viable system. It just may collapse in confusion!

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SMALL COLLISION GOOD

Small asteroid impact would mobilize the world to prevent larger collisions VERSCHUUR 1996 (Gerrit, Adjunct Prof of Physics at U of Memphis, Impact: the Threat of Comets and Asteroids, p. 163) A Tunguska type event may be what is needed for us to take seriously this threat from space. A small impact capable of wiping out a country such as Paraguay or a state such as Virginia would, in this era of mass communication, force us to take notice. With millions killed, the resources of neighboring states or nations would be pushed to their limits in coping with the tragedy, whose consequences would no doubt escalate because of the sheer scale of the devastation that would be produced. Then imagine the reprisals and the questions about why we didn't do something to prevent such a catastrophe. Small impacts are critical to mobilize support to prevent larger ones VERSCHUUR 1996 (Gerrit, Adjunct Prof of Physics at U of Memphis, Impact: the Threat of Comets and Asteroids, p. 108) On the morning of June 30, 1908, civilization may have suffered the worst piece of luck in its history. A small cometlike object exploded in the atmosphere above the Tunguska river valley in Siberia. It did little more than scorch and flatten trees for 20 kilometers in all directions and kill a thousand reindeer. However, if that object had struck a heavily populated region, we would not now dwell under any illusion concerning how close to the edge of extinction the human species actually hovers. Because the Tunguska missile missed a populated area, the threat of impact did not really begin to enter the public imagination until after the 1980 announcement of the discovery of the iridium in the K/T boundary layer. Had the Tunguska object struck a large city, a million people or more might have perished, and the phenomenon would have raised everyone's awareness to the threat of comet impact. Instead, nearly a century later, the threat of comet and asteroid impact is regarded as little more than an interesting anecdote. Very slowly the nature of the threat is being recognized, but only because of the somewhat esoteric discovery that the dinosaurs
were wiped out by a major impact 65 million years ago. Such huge collisions are infrequent, perhaps about once every 50 to 100 million years. It is the smaller impacts that pose the greatest danger, and they occur far more frequently.

Asteroid strike would cause global unity STUART 2009 (Jill, PhD from the London School of Economics, Securing Outer Space, Ed. Sheehan and Bormann, p. 20) On the other hand, future developments could serve to reinforce a cosmopolitan shift. A potential asteroidal collision, a drastic deterioration of the Earth's environment (even more than the present situation), or contact from extraterrestrials could require widespread and immediate cooperation, and further impress on humans our common collective fate. Such issues would require a practical movement towards global solutions (and perhaps greater global governance), which in turn would be based on cosmopolitan principles rooted in humanity.

***SOLVENCY

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DEFLECTION FAILS
Asteroid defense is pointlesswe cant stop comets and our asteroid tech will be outdated before it matters BENNETT 2010 (James, Prof of Economics at George Mason, The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors, p. 155
Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society, and Terry Dawson of the U.S. House of Representatives, is that societies

Absent a panic, the lack of any popular support for Earth defense vexes the Earth-savers. One lesson of human history, say Robert L. Park of the American Physical Society,

will not sustain indefinitely a defense against an infrequent and unpredictable threat. There is almost no popular constituency for asteroid defense, and it is sheer hubris to believe that any defense we are capable of designing today will be of anything more than historical interest to our descendants a century or a millennium hence.57 We are not the alpha and the omega. Our most sophisticated weapons will be to our distant descendants as spears are to us. As for defense against comets, the lesser-discussed threat from the skies, they are astonishingly intractable, write Clark R. Chapman, Daniel D. Durda, and Robert E. Gold.58 Hard to find, their motions difficult to predict, their structure and consistency questionable, comets are the wild card in the deck of Earth-killers, though since one hasnt hit us in at least many tens of millions of years, only the most hopeless superlunary hypochondriac is going to lose much sleep over them. Cant deflect all objects Cox and Chestek 96 (Donald W., Doctor in Education and James H., Professional Engineer, Doomsday Asteroid: can we survive?, Print)//DT The most essential thing in deflecting an incoming celestial missile is gaming time. If we have enough notice, we can easily move mountains. It will take time and some effort, maybe a very large effort, but we can do win an almost 100 percent chance of success. For new comets, we will have, at best, only about a year of warning, and then only if we build advanced space-based warning system. However, given this year, we will probably be able to deflect most objects with a high probability of success. For asteroids, we may have more warning time, eventuallyafter the sky surveys astronomers have proposed are completed. There will still be some comets and asteroids so big, however, that they will be a major challenge to our technology for many years.

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DETECTION NOT ENOUGH

The plan isnt enough need to research NEOs for successful mitigation NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL 2010 - Committee to Review Near-Earth-Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies Space Studies
Board (Research pg. 90, Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php? record_id=12842&page=90)

Just as the scope of earthquake research is not limited only to searching for and monitoring earthquakes, the scope of NEO hazard mitigation research should not be limited to searching for and detecting NEOs. A research program is a necessary part of an NEO hazard mitigation program. This research should be carried out in parallel with the searches for NEOs, and it should be broadly inclusive of research aimed at filling the gaps in present knowledge and understanding so as to improve scientists ability to assess and quantify impact risks as well as to support the development of mitigation strategies. This research needs to cover several areas discussed in the previous chapters of this report: risk analysis (Chapter 2), surveys and detection of NEOs (Chapter 3), characterization (Chapter 4), and mitigation (Chapter 5). The committee stresses that this research must be broad in order to encompass all of these relevant and interrelated subjects. Recommendation: The United States should initiate a peer-reviewed, targeted research program in the area of impact hazard and mitigation of NEOs. Because this is a policy-driven, applied program, it should not

be in competition with basic scientific research programs or funded from them. This research program should encompass three principal task areas: surveys, characterization, and mitigation. The scope should include analysis, simulation, and laboratory experiments. This research program does not include mitigation space experiments or tests that are treated elsewhere in this report.

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SPACE-BASED FAILS
Space based systems are expensive and most likely to fail NASA Report to Congress 7 (March, Near-Earth Object Survey and Deflection Analysis of Alternatives, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report2007.html)//DT Beyond the fact that space-based systems are historically more expensive than groundbased systems, these systems offer there are several additional drawbacks. Getting a space-based system into place subjects it to possible launch and deployment failures and places it in a hostile environment that results in a shorter lifetime (7 to 10 years). This shorter lifetime is an important consideration if a NEO program is expected to continue to track objects for extended periods of time. In addition, they are dependent upon spacecraft-to-ground data links and unique onboard software.

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WONT FIND COMETS

Asteroid surveys dont detect comets KNIGHT AND AHEARN 2002 - Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland (October 24, Matthew and Michael, How Well Do We
Understand the Cometary Hazard? NASA Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids, pg. 61) Comparison of the 136 comets discovered since 1 January 1999 reveals that non-survey

observers are much better than the surveys designed to search for NEOs at finding bright comets with small perihelion distances (q 2 AU). Since large comets are
be detected. Since the beginning of 1999, 10 of

generally brighter, and in order for a comet to collide with the Earth it must have q 1 AU, the comets which the surveys are missing are precisely the ones that most need to

the 18 newly discovered comets which reach perihelion interior to the Earths orbit were not found by the NEO surveys, but rather by non-survey observers. This large fraction of missed comets by the surveys indicates that the hazards of impacts by comets are still very uncertain due to selection effects of the surveys. These selection effects cause NEO surveys to miss bright comets with small perihelion distance. There does not appear to be a strong preference for any particular inclination, however more comets are missed in the southern sky than the northern, underscoring the need for dedicated near Earth comet surveys in the southern hemisphere. These and other selection effects must be accounted for in order to better understand the cometary hazard and to improve our current ability to detect potentially hazardous comets. Due to their diffuse appearance, large rates of motion across the sky, varying locations on the sky, and extreme variation in brightness throughout their orbits, comets are not being detected effeciently using the current asteroid detection techniques. Therefore, surveys to protect us from potentially hazardous comets must be conducted very differently from surveys for asteroids, both because the long periods of these comets make cataloging them long in advance of a threat impossible and because the surveys are not finding them.

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CANT SOLVE SMALL STRIKES

Cant solve small strikestoo many objects Lewis 1996 - professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (John S., Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 183-222) About a quarter of the total hazard is due to megaton-yield (25-meter diameter) asteroids that make airbursts at low altitudes. About once per century a megaton explosion will occur over a populated land area. The average expected death
(several hundred thousand) will occur in the single worst event of the millennium. There

rate from airburst ignition of fires, ballistic projection of window glass, and blast-wave-induced structural failure is about one thousand people per year. Most of these fatalities

are about 20 million bodies in near-Earth orbits that have megaton impact energies. About 4 percent of the bodies in this population are physically strong irons, stony-irons, or achondrites that are capable of penetrating to the surface and excavating craters if their entry velocity is not too high. Most of these crater-forming small bodies are irons. At the opposite extreme, most of the 20 million bodies are probably structurally weak, similar to carbonaceous asteroids or cometary debris, prone to explosion at altitudes above 30 kilometers. Such explosions can be spectacular, but are not a threat to Earth's surface. The remaining 40 percent or so of the population of 25-meter bodies consists of moderate-strength chondritic asteroidal material. Slow-moving ordinary chondrite material can penetrate deep enough into the atmosphere to be a serious threat at the surface. These Tunguska-type bodies present a peculiar problem: the danger presented by them is not so easily anticipated because of the vast number of bodies in this size range that must be discovered and tracked. There are ten thousand times as many Tunguska-class (25-meter) bodies as there are kilometer-class global killers. They are so faint that they are not easy to detect. Not only are they sixteen hundred times smaller in cross-section area than the kilometer-size bodies, but there is the serious possibility that they are, on average, darker than their larger cousins. Fortunately, the ones that are hardest to find (the very dark carbonaceous and cometary bodies) also so weak that they present a negligible threat to Earth's surface lace. Because of these factors, the cost of a telescope system sensitive enough to detect these bodies and extensive enough to find 20 million of them boggles the mind. Instead of the roughly 150 telescopes needed to find and track our 250-meter bodies, we would need 1.5 million telescopes {each of them superior in sensitivity, size, and cost) to find and track the 25-meter bodies. Instead of a few hundred million dollars for the entire operation, we would require an annual budget of several hundred billion dollars, comparable to the Department of Defense budget. This is not remotely feasible. The cost per life saved escalates to tens of millions of dollars per person. Clearly, political entities in the
modern world do not attach anywhere near this value to the average human life. At this price, the cost of an insurance policy is prohibitive. Besides, Tunguskas are local, not global, in their effects. They do not present a hazard to civilization or to humanity, only to a single region of a thousand or so square kilometers.

***OFFCASE ARGUMENTS

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SPENDING LINK
NASA cant do the plan without more money NASA Report to Congress 7 (March, Near-Earth Object Survey and Deflection Analysis of Alternatives,
2006 through FY 2012. We

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report2007.html)//DT Currently, NASA carries out the "Spaceguard Survey" to find NEOs greater than 1 kilometer in diameter, and this program is currently budgeted at $4.1 million per year for FY

also have benefited from knowledge gained in our Discovery space mission series, such as the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), Deep Impact, and Stardust missions that have expanded our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids and comets. Participation by NASA in international collaborations such as Japan's Hayabusa mission to the NEO "Itokawa" also greatly benefited our understanding of these objects. NASA's Dawn mission, expected to launch in June 2007, will
increase our understanding of the two largest known main belt asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, between the planets Mars and Jupiter. NASA conducts survey programs on many celestial objects - the existing Spaceguard program for NEOs, surveys for Kuiper Belt Objects, the search for extra-solar planets, and other objects of interest such as black holes to understand the origins of our universe. Our Discovery mission series in planetary science may offer additional opportunities in the future beyond our current survey efforts. NASA

recommends that the program continue as currently planned, and we will also take advantage of opportunities using potential dual-use telescopes and spacecraft - and partner with other agencies as feasible to attempt to achieve the legislated goal within 15 years. However, due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time.

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POLITICS LINK
Theres political resistance to the plan Park et al. 1994 President of the American Physical Society, PhD (Richard L., Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society and Terry Dawson of the US House of
Representatives, The Lesson of Grand Forks: Can a Defense against Asteroids be Sustained? Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids ed. Tom Gherels, pg. 1225-1228) IV. INVOLVING CONGRESS Efforts to persuade governments lo invest significant resources in evaluation of the hazard of asteroid impacts must overcome what has been called "the giggle factor." Clearly, elected officials in Washington are not being inundated with mail from constituents complaining that a member of their family has just been killed or their property destroyed by a marauding asteroid. Indeed, the prevailing view among government officials who hear about this issue for the first time is that the epoch of large asteroid strikes on Earth ended millions or billions of years ago. Congressional involvement has been confined to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the U. S. House of Representatives, whose current chair, George Brown of California, has maintained an interest in the asteroid issue for several years. The Committee directed NASA to conduct two international workshops on the asteroid threat (House Committee on Science, Space and Technology 1990). The objective of the first was to determine the extent to which the threat is "real," and to define a program for significantly increasing the detection rate of large asteroids in Earthcrossing orbits. The second dealt with the feasibility of preventing large asteroids from striking Earth (see the Chapter by Canavan et al.). In March of 1993, the Space Subcommittee held a formal hearing to examine the results of the two workshops. Some members remain skeptical that the threat is real. But even among those who recognize that it is only a question of when a major impact will occur, there was no sense of urgency. Given the severe constraints imposed by the current budget situation, therefore, it seems unlikely that Congress would agree to devote more than a few million dollars per year to asteroid detection and research. If prudently spent, however, even that modest level of resources should significantly speed up the process of cataloging Earth-crossing asteroids. Perhaps the major impact of the workshops has been in NASA itself. The Agency now seems persuaded that near-Earth asteroids are deserving of scientific attention, and that efforts should be made to increase the rate at which such objects are identified.

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EUROPE C/P SOLVENCY

Earthguard solves spaced based detection German Aerospace Center 2003 (January, EARTHGUARD-I A Space-Based NEO Detection System
http://www.esa.int/gsp/completed/neo/earthguard1_execsum.pdf) Since early July 2002 a Phase-A

study under contract to ESA has been carried out with the goal of defining a mission to search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs) which are difficult or even impossible to detect from groundbased locations. Based on longterm orbital evolution studies of known NEOs it is expected that a significant fraction of the NEO population has orbits that are mostly or completely inside the Earths orbit - the so called Atens and Inner-Earth Objects (IEOs). Due to their short orbital periods of less than one year their encounter frequency is high, and so is their potential impact risk. The EARTHGUARD-I study resulted in a design for a telescope, including a turntable with one degree of
freedom, sensor electronics and a data processing unit, which could be accommodated on a planned spacecraft such as the BepiColombo Mercury Orbiter, or a dedicated spacecraft which would cruise to a heliocentric orbit of around 0.5 AU utilizing advanced low-thrust propulsion, either solar sailing or solar electric (ion) propulsion.

Earthguard solves NEO detection and European leadership in space German Aerospace Center 2003 (January, EARTHGUARD-I A Space-Based NEO Detection System
http://www.esa.int/gsp/completed/neo/earthguard1_execsum.pdf)

EARTHGUARD-I will greatly enhance our knowledge of the Near Earth Object population and potential impactors on Earth. The piggy-back option aboard BepiColombo offers a cost-effective opportunity to transport this telescope to a nearSun orbit. This vantage point allows the detection of Earth-threatening asteroids which are difficult or even impossible to detect from the ground. The EARTHGUARD-I telescope will strengthen ESAs and Europes lead in the area of Near Earth Objects and the hazard they pose to Earth, and facilitate ESAs compliance with Resolution 1080 (1996) of the Council of Europe (on the detection of asteroids and comets potentially dangerous to humankind).

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DOD C/P SOLVENCY

DOD can solve the case Worden 2002 - United States Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base (October 24, S.P., Military Perspectives on the Near-Earth Object (Neo) Threat. NASA

Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids, http://www.noao.edu/meetings/mitigation/media/arlington.extended.pdf pg. 101 )

The most promising systems for wide-area survey particularly to observe close to the sun to see objects coming up from that directionare space-based surveillance systems. Today the only space-based space surveillance system is the DoDs Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite. This was a late 1990s missile defense test satellite, and
most of its sensors have now failed. However one small package weighing about 20 kg and called the Space-Based Visible sensor is able to search and track satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) using visible light. This

has been a phenomenally successful mission, having lowered the number of lost objects in GEO orbit by over a factor of two. MSX is not used for imaging asteroids, but a similar sensor could be. The Canadian Space Agency, in concert with the Canadian Department of National Defense, is considering a microsatellite experiment with the entire satellite
and payload weighing just 60 kg. This Near-Earth Surveillance System would track satellites in GEO orbit, as MSX does today. However, it would also be able to search the critical region near the sun for NEOs that would be missed by conventional surveys.

DOD can solve accidental war Park et al. 1994 President of the American Physical Society, PhD (Richard L., Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society and Terry Dawson of the US House of
Representatives, The Lesson of Grand Forks: Can a Defense against Asteroids be Sustained? Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids ed. Tom Gherels, pg. 1225-1228) V. INVOLVING THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE In addition to cataloging the orbits of large near-Earth objects, the primary

focus of the astronomical community for the foreseeable future will be to study their origin and composition, and to determine the size distribution of objects striking Earth. The frequency of impacts of objects of various sizes is known only to limited precisions (Chapter b> Rabinowitz et al.). In particular, objects up to several meters in diameter explode in the atmosphere without reaching the surface. Although the energy released in these explosions may be many times greater that released by the Hiroshima bomb, they most frequently occur over the ocean or sparsely inhabited regions of Earth and go unreported. The system of military' surveillance satellite s, however, which exists to detect nuclear detonations or missile launches, are well suited to detection and evaluation of small asteroid impacts. Indeed, some useful data on such impacts may already exist on archived computer tapes, covering the past twenty years. In any case, if "tasked to do so, the military satellites could provide a rich source of information on the size distribution of Earth-impacting asteroids (see the Chapter by Tagliafcrri et al.). Representative George Brown (1993) sent a letter to Secretary- of Defense Les Aspin requesting that the Defense Department provide active support to the astronomical community in collecting and disseminating scientifically useful information concerning asteroid strikes that do not reach the surface.